My First Time: “Did he get his diptet?”
[My First Time is a recurring Shut Up And Deal feature in which we finally watch the films that other people say we should have already seen.]
RAISING ARIZONA (Coen Brothers, 1987)
posted by Christine
What happens when you see Raising Arizona for the first time in your twenties? You feel a complicated pulling of emotions. You fall in love with Nicolas Cage — to be more precise, you fall in love with Nicolas Cage’s hair. You also fall in love with his skinny doggy face and his sad eyes and you think, that could have been me, married to him, stealing a baby! Then you remember that that could never be you, and maybe — maybe — that makes you a little sad.
When Nathan Arizona is negotiating with the biker whose mama didn’t love him, I whispered something to my friend M.F. about the “market” and “capitalism.” He hissed, not very quietly, that the movie is “ALL ABOUT REAGAN” Duh, I thought to myself. Duh. And once someone whispers to you that something is about Reagan, it does indeed become difficult to see it from any other angle. H.I. and Ed, who just want to take a little piece of happiness from people who have “more than they can handle,” who are pursued on all sides by those wanting to steal that happiness and sell it to the highest bidder, who eventually are so convinced that they don’t have a right to happiness that they bring it back to the fat cat himself. They’re infertile, the land is dry (except when its bursting with mud to give birth to two convicts), the work is boring holes in sheets of metal, and we don’t even know what the metal is used for. They’re not bad people, they’re told; just unfit.
During that first amazing sequence of mug shots, prison bunks and courtship, Reanu pointed out that the movie works on three levels: as pure dialogue, as pure visuals, and as pure music. (Where would I be without others pointing things out to me?) He’s right. And seeing it, I was struck by the way the Coen brothers are a kind of anti-Wes Anderson unit, who are just as meticulous and painstaking in their style, and just as purposeful about music, and just as obsessed with dysfunction and reconciliation. But their interest is in representing the Stop and Shop stick up boys, not the Marc Jacobs by Louis Vuitton set. I heart Wes (and when I say heart, I mean, really heart), and I’m not saying that we have to choose between them. But maybe they’re two halves of one whole. Maybe.
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